Tips on how to tell if someone is lying
Quick facts
•The signs that someone is lying are not easy to decipher.
• Lying can be more mentally tasking than telling the truth. If you add even more cognitive complexity, behavioral cues may become more apparent.
• Women are far better at both lying and detecting lies than men. Men tell simple lies like, “I miss the taxi,” while women tell more complicated, believable ones.
Behavioral differences between honest and lying individuals are difficult to discriminate against and measure.
Researchers have attempted to uncover several ways of detecting lies ( like using the polygraph test). While they may not be a simple, tell-tale sign that someone is dishonest, researchers have found helpful indicators.
According to body language experts and law enforcement veterans, liars provide plenty of hints and clues when they’re being less honest. When you’re speaking with someone you’re familiar with, think about their baseline, or how they’d normally act in a stressful situation. If their behavior doesn’t seem to be the same, check out this list.
1) Look for micro-expressions.
When people tell lies, they are usually fearful, sad, or angry. They want to hide the truth. Liars tend to show emotions one way or another. In many cases, their expressions will shift for a fraction of a second ( also known as micro-expression). Pay attention to tiny shifts in a person’s face throughout a conversation. A liar might show their true colors for a brief moment, even if they don’t mean to.
That’s why they learn to suppress their emotions. Liars might even look unnaturally and act like their faces are displaying an unnatural, blank-stare look.
For example, a liar might show a micro-expression of guilt or regret while telling a story, which proves they could be lying.
2) Keep an eye out for mismatches or late hand gestures.
Pay attention to the person’s hand movements throughout the conversation. If they’re lying, the person will move their hands after sharing their story, instead of while they’re telling it.
People who are honest and sincere will display gestures that match, especially with their hands. For example, if you tell someone their breath is stinky, they might cross their arms, purse their lips, and clench their hands into tight fits.
On the other hand, lairs may show body language that indicates one thing, but their hands might not match up.
3) providing excessive information
Sometimes, liars tend to provide or give you too much information — information that is not requested and especially an excess of details to convince themselves or others of what they are saying. They may also embellish with words that a person telling the truth wouldn’t think of adding.
4) The speech’s content
Linguistic cues show that liars tend to use more profanity and third-person pronouns such as he, she, and they to distance themselves from any first-person (e.g., my, I, mine) involvement.
Sometimes, someone may be trying hard to convince you with phrases such as, “Honestly,” “I want to be honest,” or “Let me tell you the truth.
Liars may also want to buy time to figure out what they are going to say next by using words such as; “hu,” ‘like,’ and ‘um’
5) Direction of the eyes
Someone who is lying might stare or look away at a specific moment. This could be a sign that they’re trying to move their eyes as they consider what to say next.
The 2015 study conducted by the University of Michigan also found that those who lied were more likely to stare than those who were truthful — so much so that 70% of the chips of people lying showed them staring directly at the people they were lying to.
6) Making a finger motion
Liars tend to point towards something or someone else with gestures or words. This may signal a surefire desire to take the focus off of an individual and place it on someone else.
Sometimes, knowing if the person normally gesticulates can be a helpful guide. However, if someone speaks in a measured demeanor as opposed to a hostile one, one that includes finger-pointing, this aggressive switch may indicate that they’re lying.
7) Fidgeting
Think about what a child (or kid) does when asked where the last fruit went. They make them look at their nails, lick their lips, or even shake their hands — and then tell a big whopper of a lie.
When people are nervous, fluctuations in the nervous system can cause people to feel itches in their bodies, which in turn can cause fidgeting.
They may be unconsciously trying to calm that anxiety response or at least get the blood flowing, all of which could point to nervousness about telling a lie.
8) Pretending to smile
A real smile affects the whole face. A fake smile displays the lower teeth with no crows on the face. Think of it this way — if you see crow’s feet on a person’s face, they’re probably telling the truth.
If you still can’t determine whether the person is not being truthful,
Ask them to tell their stories backward.
Lying can be more mentally taxing than telling the truth. If you add even more cognitive complexity, behavioral clues may become more apparent.
Not only is telling a lie more cognitively demanding, but liars typically exert much more mental energy towards monitoring their behaviors and evaluating the responses of others. They are concerned with their credibility and ensuring that other people believe their stories. All these take a considerable amount of effort, so if you ask them to tell their stories in the reverse order, cracks in the story and other behavioral indicators might become easier to spot.
Truth-tellers will stick to the same story while offering more details, while liars often get tripped up and create a different story while not adding any details to the original.
Disclaimer:
This article is written to be accurate according to the writer’s knowledge. There is no guarantee that the methods outlined here can be used to determine if someone is lying or not.
The reality is that there is no universal surefire that someone is lying. All the signs, behaviors, and indicators that researchers have linked to lying are simply clues that might reveal whether a person is being forthright.
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